The Impact Equation

by Chris Brogan

  You belong to several communities. You own a Camaro and keep up with news and shared information in that space. You practice Krav Maga and keep up to speed with the big names in that space. You listen to Bob Marley and know the tribute bands. You also watch Adventure Time and love Finn the Human enough to wear T-shirts featuring him. Usually we don’t align with just one community. And yet nurturing those who choose to spend some of their time, attention, and effort contributing to the community you’re fortunate enough to serve should be a priority.

  A network is something different. A network spans more than one community. If we need someone with mobile-marketing skills or experience-marketing knowledge, we know to bother Tim Hayden in Austin, Texas. If we want someone in the technical side of the digital-publishing industry, we bother Hugh McGuire from PressBooks in Canada. We know that Joel Libava is experienced with franchises. We have learned how to nurture networks that span many different countries and many different needs.

  Three Very Different Interactions

  The way you spend your time with these three types of people depends on how each contributes to your own success and value. If you run a transactional business, like selling more burgers for some marginal amount of profit, then an audience will suit that need just fine. You don’t need to nurture a burger community. You probably don’t even need a network to help you get this job done. If you’re selling a high-priced product that has a very long sales lead cycle, a community would be a great investment of your time and effort, because the referrals that come from such a community would help you immensely. If you work in multiple verticals or niches, a varied network is vital to your survival.

  We would argue that having a decent network is important no matter what business you find yourself in. Further, we feel that many people don’t do enough to nurture and diversify their network, and they usually find this out after they lose their job. Time and time again we receive e-mails from people who find themselves suddenly out of work, and time and time again we find ourselves asked to help get them back on track. We usually haven’t heard from these people for a year at least, and then their first interaction with us is a request for help in finding work. See why that doesn’t usually work well?

  Maintaining a community takes a lot of time and effort, and it’s the hardest return-on-investment sell in the world to convince your employer (or sometimes yourself) of its direct and instant worth. And yet book after book presents case studies showing the benefit of having a strong community.

  Industries That Would Benefit from a Community-Nurturing Approach

  The human elements of the Impact Equation work really well for businesses that require more than a simple transaction to complete a sale.

  Real estate works much better with a community element. Become the hub of neighborhood news and business matchmaking, and you will find yourself getting calls often.

  Business-to-business products and services are great for community-based sales, because you can link noncompeting customers together to talk about successful recipes for using your products, which encourages more use and sales.

  Complex products like software and creative products like cameras or musical instruments benefit from having communities, because what you make with them (like photos, music, or Word documents) becomes public. Further, a community permits people to cross-educate and solve minor issues without the company’s intervention. Dell, for example, has very active user-driven forums where people often solve one another’s problems without any Dell-badged employee intervening.

  Communities of like-minded individuals often form. For instance, if you’re the type of person who loves Entrepreneur magazine, you probably want to speak with other readers. These communities can form easily if there is often new material for them to interact with. For instance, beer lovers can talk about new brews they’ve experienced. Look at Yelp. Some people go there to read reviews, but others consider themselves active Yelpers. A Yelper believes that he or she is helping others make better purchasing decisions. See the value in that?

  The Value of Communities and Networks to Companies

  Businesses have yet to take this to heart, with some exceptions. Some realize that the value of a salesperson is in whether he or she can build a network and get doors opened. But what does a business typically do? It builds in all kinds of restrictions on how a salesperson can and cannot interact with those connections, for fear that the salesperson will leave and take those connections with him or her.

  It starts with fear. “If Sharon spends our time and money networking, and then she quits and takes those people with her, we’ve invested in an asset that we weren’t able to utilize. Therefore, we will write rules and restrictions to make sure this doesn’t happen.” Thus companies confirm that a network is actually important, but then, for some reason, they forget this completely.

  Should a customer-service employee be encouraged to network? Why not? Should your finance team be encouraged to network? What would be the benefit to your business’s community if you added even more of your team to the experience?

  Chris Grams from Red Hat (which is Linux software) told us that one of the company lawyers became quite active in the Red Hat community. When it came time to iterate on a new version of the fedora logo, her contribution was to help people understand the legal perspective on what they were doing. Instead of being a pesky outsider, this lawyer was dead center in the experience.

  We believe that everyone in the company could be adding much more value if they were permitted (and even encouraged) to build more relationships and to nurture the company’s community.

  How does this add value? Imagine that your prospective buyer actually knows how to reach more than just the salesperson, and that the buyer can ask a product question to the person who creates or maintains the product. How much will that aid in the buying decision? Think about how it would feel to be a paying customer of a service or product and be able to talk whenever you choose with people who provide that experience to you. (We both have this opportunity all the time, speaking with people from companies that represent products and services we use. It’s a powerful and wonderfully synergistic feeling.)

  This works from an acquisition standpoint: I can talk with these people, so I know more about what I intend to buy. It also works from a retention standpoint: I wasn’t sure how to use this product to the best of my ability, but I’m able to talk with people to improve my usage (which, in turn, drives more adoption and future purchases). If your effort to build and maintain a platform that reaches people through the human element could drive more people to buy and more people to stay, wouldn’t that be a valuable enough proposition?

  We see it that way. And in these coming sections, we intend to prove it.

  6 Trust

  Okay, what is Trust, really? Is it a feeling, or does it have rational backing? Can it be built quickly, or does it require a bunch of time? The answer, as usual, is that it depends.

  In our years at conferences, in business meetings, and in personal interactions, we’ve seen audiences beguiled enough in forty-five minutes that they’re willing to hand a speaker a significant amount of their hard-earned money. We’ve also seen people screw up quickly enough to ruin years’ worth of Trust in one sentence. Both are possible not because of the information the presenter gives out, but because of how he makes his audience feel.

  In some ways, Trust is easy to understand. We all get it, and we can easily tell if we trust someone or not. Trust is about confidence and reliability. Trust is about feeling close to someone. It’s easy to understand if we trust someone else, but how can we tell if someone trusts us? That isn’t as easy.

  We send thousands of subconscious signals, hundreds of times a day, to individuals we interact with. When people read our material, when they interact with us directly, and when they see us in videos or in real life, in each instance they are making basic Trust decisions, such as whether they should ask us to watch their laptop at the local café. The
reason we are so good at deciding these things is because it is built into our genes, and any deviation from the norm could, at one point, have been a fatal decision.

  Yet the Web is a different environment that, in some ways, changes the rules. Lots of the signals we would normally receive from others are blocked off. We now interact more through media such as Twitter and text messages than we do in real life, making our signals go haywire. Whom do we trust, and how does it happen? It’s gotten a lot more complex. Fundamentally, it’s the same as it has always been, but the way we send the signals transforms the entire exchange.

  You may know our previous book, Trust Agents, in which we discussed the emergence of a new type of individual adept at using the new tools of the Web to take advantage of this transformation. If so, you’ll be pleased to know that we’ll go deeper into that discussion here and deal more with the really important stuff. Trust Agents clocked in at around three hundred pages, but here we have only around thirty, so we plan to use them wisely.

  The Trust Equation

  Before this book existed or was even a twinkle in our eyes, the book we were best known for was Trust Agents. You may have read it—a lot of people did—and if that’s the case, you may have noticed that although we based it on the idea of Trust, we didn’t talk much about the mechanics of how Trust works. Instead, we focused on how to build audience and be human on the Web in a general sense and assumed that an understanding of Trust would follow. Looking back on it now, however, we’re not sure if this was the way it should have been done.

  We often note that the best parts of books, or the best books in general, include sections that talk about things in a very detailed, clear way. The most highlighted parts of Chris’s Kindle books are often the most precise ones. People seem fascinated by how many hours are spent on social media by professionals, for example, and by how many times they post and share per day. We wouldn’t have guessed it, but it turns out that sometimes precision is exactly what people want.

  When we wrote this book, we considered the ten-thousand-foot view, but we also knew that each Impact Attribute would need to be discussed in a concrete manner, because it’s how you get ideas to stick most effectively. With that in mind, we present to you the Trust Equation, on which the whole idea of this book was constructed. For this we are much indebted to The Trusted Advisor, by David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford.

  C * R * I / S = TRUST

  C = Credibility

  R = Reliability

  I = Intimacy

  S = Self-interest

  Credibility is what you say that can actually be backed up by your credentials. A Harvard Business Review guy is more qualified than your average Joe to talk about how Trust works in business, for example. We are (some say) more qualified to talk about building an audience on the Web than some random blogger. And so on. When credibility is high, it’s often because you have qualification signals such as degrees or industry accolades.

  Reliability is what happens when you do what you say you will do. For example, if you say, “I can deliver a thousand new visitors to your Web site by next week,” and you do so, you are reliable. We’ve called reliability the Web’s secret sauce because people on the Web tend to do things whenever they like, which displays low reliability So those who deliver regularly are those who win. High reliability means you do what you say you will do, often. If that doesn’t seem rare to you, you clearly have never worked on the Internet.

  Intimacy is a secret sauce of a different type. It ranges from “I like him, so I’ll help him out” to “She really understands me” or even just “He listens.” Intimacy is all levels of closeness between individuals, often for personal reasons that aren’t related to business but that influence business decisions every day. Have you ever decided to work with someone just because you felt he was a good guy and deserved your business, even if he was kind of unreliable and had no credentials? Well, that’s intimacy at work.

  As it turns out, further studies after The Trusted Advisor was published proved intimacy is by far the most important part of the equation. (This is why we have given it its own name, Echo, and its own section.)

  Self-interest is the final part of this equation. Just as Contrast (in our Impact Equation) is a force multiplier for everything else, self-orientation is the big problem in any trust-related transaction. If someone seems like a used-car salesman, they have a high self-orientation. If they seem like they genuinely want to help and want the best for you whether they get your business or not, they have a low self-orientation.

  Self-orientation is also about knowing how to listen. Are you waiting your turn to talk, for example, or truly listening with the intent of absorbing what matters to your conversation partner? The difference between a high and low self-orientation is often subtle, because it requires an understanding of body language and other nuances that don’t give themselves away easily.

  In the next few segments, we’re going to bring this together alongside ideas of our own that will help you understand how important Trust is to leaving a good, lasting impression on people. It isn’t possible to use Trust alone to get all your goals achieved, of course; you do need people to actually hear about you and your ideas, for example. But once they’re on the inside, high Trust allows your ideas to massively spread, increasing Exposure and other factors at a fraction of the time and resource cost.

  Then, and Now

  In writing this book, we found ourselves approaching the Trust section with the most trepidation. Many companies and individuals we researched as examples scored lowest in the Trust attribute. We want to stress that this doesn’t mean we feel anyone is not trustworthy or not to be trusted. It was just harder to talk through the mechanics of Trust and harder to show a company’s or individual’s demonstration of it as part of impact.

  And yet, over and over again, we felt that Trust was one of the most important attributes of the entire equation. A lot of the other attributes will be for naught if companies and individuals can’t earn Trust and demonstrate their trustworthiness to sustain the business relationship.

  When this book talked about how DollarShaveClub.com made a powerful leap from a very simple idea into something quite successful, the concern was that Trust wasn’t immediately obvious and that perhaps it would take a while for the company to earn a reputation of Trust. If people felt the product was of value, was received on time, and all their transactions with the company went well, then some “noise” of that experience and reputation would filter out, and people would share indications of that Trust.

  In a longish way, we’re saying that Trust is one of the most elusive and difficult of the Impact Attributes, and you will have to work to earn it. It matters a great deal to your customers, your prospects, your partners, and everyone else. Small-town Trust used to be a matter of time. The same has become true of doing business on the Web, and small-town values certainly are a great way to look at Trust building for your own organization. (Grab Small Town Rules, by Barry Moltz and Becky McCray, as it covers that in spades.)

  You might find some success without working on Trust, but we’ve baked the need for it into the Impact Equation for a reason. To sustain a strong business experience in today’s marketplace, Trust will be a longer and more visible path than ever before. In a world of reviews, online complaints, and the inability to hide any bad experiences from future buyers, you’ll find Trust a powerful and important attribute.

  Basic Human Behaviors

  During the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, the most famous participant was not an announcer, nor a soccer player, nor even a referee. It was a traditional South African instrument: the vuvuzela.

  Just as you remember where you were during the Challenger disaster or when you heard that Princess Di had passed away, you remember the first time you heard that sound. It is horrible, and you will never forget it. You could hear it blasting throughout the audio track of every single World Cup game, deafeningly and without end. Many found t
he only solution was to turn the sound off entirely. Television networks applied filters to the audio of soccer games so the sound wouldn’t be so disruptive.

  But someone at YouTube clearly did not agree. Around the end of June 2010, YouTube introduced the vuvuzela button. Blogs, Twitter, and pretty much every other social network were flooded with expressions of shock at its appearance on every single YouTube video—that is to say, billions of them.

  How did it work? Well, the vuvuzela button did one thing and one thing only: It played the vuvuzela, loudly. No matter the video, be it Bach piano concertos, Norwegian heavy metal, or Rick Astley, the vuvuzela was played at equal volume. The volume could not be turned down—it could only be turned on or off via a simple button in the shape of a soccer ball.

  Take a moment to imagine the horror of this situation on a grand scale. At any given time, around the globe, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of YouTube videos are being watched about any given subject. The vuvuzela is not a welcome addition to any of these videos, not even the ones about the World Cup. The vuvuzela was considered one of the most annoying cultural imports of South Africa precisely because it invaded every game a soccer fan could watch. The world did not need more vuvuzela. It needed less.

  Yet here was YouTube. It had not merely talked about this internally but actually done it. Millions of vuvuzelas, all across the world, were going to be played through everyone’s speakers, in offices and homes everywhere, startling some and upsetting many. Google Analytics fans could unquestionably say that this would increase bounce rate, reduce time on-site, and decrease ad clicks. In other words, it was a straight-up bad business decision.

  Okay, enough of this hyperbole. The real question is this: Why would YouTube do this? Why would some higher-ups at Google decide this was a good idea? Why would all these people purposefully reduce time on-site, increase bounce rate, and willingly annoy millions of users?